—Een dem days, Krys, de year was 1954, my grandmother tells me, messengahs an dem was anybody yuh know. Ah poor boi een yuh village. Vagrant, bruddah.
George Ali, Rebecca’s father, roused himself from a drunken stupor. He babbled incoherently, spittle catching in his beard. Within a few seconds, he lost consciousness; his chin met his collarbones, and his thin frame slouched back onto the couch. Jacinta and Rebecca slipped quietly around him, afraid he’d wake up and start thrashing them both for their late start.
Rebecca and her mother gathered necessary things for their day of work—two baskets and bottles of water refilled from the nearby well. Her mother pulled a battered towel around her head and rubbed her eyes with the knotted end. Rebecca only observed as her mother choked down her anguish.
They exited the wooden house, which was stacked on bricks. Rebecca glanced back at the table and chairs cramped together before shutting their front door, which had no lock. Her mother stumbled across the gravel, spraying dust into the air and into their eyes. Rebecca kneaded away the particles from her eyes and bent forward in frustration.
She knew nothing of this uncle, had only distant memories of visiting her grandparents when she was a child. This man her mother cried for was dear only because he was blood, a brother. They had been estranged for many years.
Jacinta and Rebecca, mother and daughter, trod alongside the main road, which curved around plantations of coffee, cocoa, bananas, and oranges. Rebecca led while her mother stifled sniffles along the way. Rebecca thought of the flower-arranging class she had to attend later that day and of the man her friend Lacey promised to introduce her to. The class was the only thing her father allowed her to do other than the plantation work she must do with her mother.
Rebecca had failed the Common Entrance exam when she was thirteen, then fourteen, fifteen, and finally sixteen. The exam tested one’s capabilities in math, English, and science. Without passing, one couldn’t move from standard five in elementary school to form one in secondary school. After she had failed the final time, there was nothing left for her to do but work.
In the government school she attended, the principal felt sorry for Rebecca and allowed her to repeat standard five three times, but at sixteen Rebecca was too old to continue her education with ten-year-olds. Unlike the principal, who viewed Rebecca’s return year after year as a way for her to redeem herself, to forge a path ahead through education, the teachers scorned and ridiculed her. They used her as a cautionary example for the other children. Every year, they singled her out, commanded her to stand up and walk to the front of the class, where she was forced to recite how often she’d been left back and how many times she’d repeated standard five. But her parents sent her back every time the principal offered, until all her opportunities had been used up.
The principal was a man with a bald head and severe eyes, but beneath these features Rebecca discovered compassion. The results of the students’ exams came in envelopes, with each name scrawled across the front. The last time Rebecca took the exam, instead of letting her teacher humiliate her in front of the class again, he called her to his office to give her the final results himself. It was toward the end of the school year then, months after she’d already sat for the test with the pencil her mother had whittled to a crude point with a dull knife. He explained that she was much too old to repeat standard five again. This, he said, was the end of her educational route, but there were others she could take, and he offered her a handshake and a smile along with her opened envelope.
Again she had failed. It didn’t sink in until after she left the principal’s office. Only after she passed her teachers, triumph and contempt stamped on their faces, did Rebecca truly realize she was leaving school for good.
Girls hugged one another and cried because they’d been accepted to schools at opposite ends of the country. Their long hair hung down the backs of their uniforms in tightly braided plaits, blue satin ribbons looped lovingly into tidy bows against their dark hair. They clutched their exam results to their hearts, some wailing, others smiling. The wailing ones were the daughters who would inform their fathers they would be attending junior secondary schools; the beaming daughters would be celebrated because they were accepted to the number one all-girls school in the country—St. Augustine Girls. If you passed through there, you were expected to become a doctor or a lawyer, the only two professions of substance and respect in Trinidad.
She walked through the open courtyard, not bothering to finish the term—what was the point? There were no friends to hug her as she left, no one to miss her. The image of the girls in their crisp blue-and-white uniforms holding on to one another stayed with her.
She told her parents that evening. Her mother hung her head in shame. Her father beat her and, as he did, told her it was what he’d expected from her anyway. Their neighbors in the little village of Coal Mine peered through their windows to watch her humiliation.
Soon after the school term ended, Rebecca’s father ordered her to work the plantations with Jacinta. He told them they needed all the money they could get and that sending Rebecca back to school all those years had been a waste, when she could’ve been working like all his other children. Rebecca didn’t point out that, of his ten children, only three were left at home.
—Krys, my grandmother says to me, Mama was always tryin to help meh, all ah we. She din wahn none ah she chilren toh stick up dey een de bush like she, she din wah we toh wok de fiels like she atall. She put it in meh head toh get out, toh goh.
After six months of working the plantations Monday through Friday, and cooking and cleaning on Saturday and Sunday, Jacinta told Rebecca about the flower-arranging class she had secretly found for her daughter to take. The class convened three times a week, and Rebecca could attend after their daily work on the plantations. Jacinta assured her daughter it wasn’t expensive and showed her the money she’d been keeping back little by little from her husband so Rebecca could take the class. Jacinta lined coins at the bottom of the basket she used for collecting coffee pods in fields and taped them down so they wouldn’t jingle and betray her. On top of them she taped a flattened paper bag and then layered a towel.
This was how Rebecca came to appreciate the basket rocking back and forth on her mother’s arm as they trudged to work that day. The woven wicker caught on the cotton threads of her mother’s dress, and the anger Rebecca felt toward Jacinta—for crying over a dead brother who never cared to visit them—subsided.
The details of the union between Rebecca’s parents, Jacinta Garcia and George Ali, were lost memories. No one remembered and no one recorded. The details she knew were: Jacinta had an elder sister and George an elder brother. Their brother and sister were in love and planned their wedding at the Ali residence.
—Yuh know it was customary back den toh hah ting like dis, my grandmother tells me. De priess use toh come toh de house an perform de ceremony nah. It was durin dat Mama and Pa di staht cryin toh geh mar-red too. Oh so ah remembah when Mama di tell meh di story. Dah is juss how it appen.
Rebecca did not know how her parents met. She did know they’d been seeing each other for a long time, and when they begged to get married on the day of their elder siblings’ marriage, the celebration turned into a double union before the priest under the Ali roof. Protestants were one of the largest religious groups in Trinidad. Theirs was a Presbyterian wedding, one that embraced the Christian religious beliefs of the Venezuelan sisters and dismissed those of the Muslim Indian brothers, something that turned George Ali sour till the day he died.
In a land where cultures and religions remained as neatly cleaved as the dry season from the rainy, George and Jacinta’s union was an unusual one. Though there were different nationalities on the island, they were expected not to mix. And though the nuptials were sanctioned and both sides were present, George’s family did not approve. They thought Venezuelans, from the neighboring country they could see off the coast of Trinidad, were below them. Th
eir skin was too dark, not like their olive undertones, which they tried to protect from the sun; and their hair too coarse, cropped close to their heads, not like theirs that spilled past their shoulders.
For two first-generation Indian-Muslim men to wed two first-generation Venezuelan women in Trinidad was to invite severe social disapproval that would traumatize their families for generations to come. Snubbed, whispered about, and ignored by family, friends, and strangers, Jacinta and George were pushed out of civilization, well up into the mountains where others like them—poor, mismatched, disabled—had cobbled together the nine houses they called their village.
EXPOSED TO GLASS SHARDS, bottle caps, nails, and other dangers, Jacinta and Rebecca—and later, Arya—traveled many of the same roads in Trinidad. When the rare car passed Jacinta and Rebecca as they walked along the side of the road, they hid behind bushes or trees. If she was too tired to drop and roll down the embankment, Rebecca looked for a leafy banana tree, pulled down the leaves, and encased her body in a wall of green.
—We eh wan people toh see we nah, says my grandmother. We eh wahn dem toh know we was rheal laborers. Yuh di hah toh hide dem ting back in de day.
But that never stopped Rebecca from staring at the car as it chugged away. She yearned to be in a car, to be driven somewhere instead of having to walk everywhere barefoot. These cars that puttered past must have belonged to majestic households, she thought, houses with their own wells and private latrines, unlike the community ones they all shared. People who had houses with doors and locks, furniture and rooms. Houses deliberately planted on their own land, not a haphazard village set up in the middle of the forest. There would be land aplenty with farm animals to care for and reap from.
—House, lan, and motohcah, my grandmother says, dah is all meh evah wanted.
THEY WALKED TO THE CHECK-IN and check-out shacks located at either end of the fence. Her mother took both their baskets and marched to the check-in shack. An attendant pulled out a piece of twine with increments blackened along its length. He measured the width and depth of their baskets, then issued paper passes with numbers for the day. Rebecca remained behind, dawdling until the measuring was finished. Almost everyone else had arrived hours ago.
Jacinta handed Rebecca back her basket. Within a week of Rebecca leaving school, her mother had scrounged together enough money to buy her one of her own. It wasn’t new, but the glaze over the woven wood was intact. To preserve it from sun, rain, and coffee stains, her mother told her to wrap a plastic bag around the thick handle and layer the base of it with a towel. After Rebecca’s failed attempts to cover the handle, her mother showed her the basket she’d been using for over five years. She pointed out where she wrapped the plastic around the midway point and held it at two-inch increments with fraying twine. Rebecca knew they couldn’t afford another one, but she didn’t want to follow her mother down the same path either; to treat this basket the way her mother had treated her own would trap her in Coal Mine forever. But at her mother’s insistence, the plaited handles of her basket had been wrapped and stripped of plastic bags several times over the past year. Only the twine remained, yellowed and unraveling. The towel, folded and patted on the bottom, was streaked with reds and browns. No matter how many times Rebecca scrubbed the towel against the stone grate in the washbasin, the pungent smell of damp earth mingling with sweet leaves and coffee never deserted it.
Today, Rebecca looped the handle on the inside of her elbow.
They entered.
Because this field had been open to harvesters for two weeks, the trees had already been stripped of coffee bunches for miles. Nevertheless, they searched outstretched vines for blushing cherries, but all they found were green pellets budding along the leaves. A full basket fetched only a dollar, and they had to fill both.
Their work was split into two categories—day’s work and task work. Day’s work was picking from eight a.m. to three p.m., and it was during these days that they each had to fill their basket to earn a dollar. For task work, Jacinta and Rebecca hoed, clumped, and cutlassed branches around the bases of eighteen trees in one section of the plantation until they were clear.
—It eh play di hah plenty snake dat ah hide up een dem bush nah, my grandmother tells me. Big-big fat-fat snake. Yuh fine one so yuh bettah cut off e head quick and doh play nah. Mama was ah strong oman, she use toh mash up e head.
Because her mother was older than other laborers and seemed to droop with each passing day under the sun, Rebecca tried to shoulder most of the labor. She worked fast, trying to finish early so she wouldn’t be late for class. The man her friend Lacey had promised to introduce her to was rich. Rheal rich Becca, doh worry ahgo take care ah yuh, Lacey said to her.
Of the coffee, cocoa, banana, and citrus trees they combed, the coffee was by far the most difficult to obtain. Coffee trees were spaced ten feet apart. Running all around them, resembling little squares on graph paper, were deep drains in place for irrigation.
Rebecca, along with her mother and other workers, toiled on the prosperous land owned by the wealthy of Trinidad.
Today they started at the beginning of the plantation at one coffee field, searching between branches for bunches that might have been left behind. Rebecca and Jacinta methodically searched clusters, turning the green stems over carefully, hoping some would be red. After an hour of burrowing into trees and twisting stems where the sun had no chance to touch and ripen, their pace quickened from a stride to a trot. They scrambled up and down still-moist ditches. Worms wriggled before they were severed between their toes. Black earth built under their nails and around their cuticles.
The walls of some drains were too steep for Jacinta to climb without help. Rebecca took their baskets, ran up the side, dropped them at the top, and skidded back down to help her mother. With each pull up, Rebecca kicked and patted dirt to form footholds for her mother to grasp or step on. At the top, they collapsed at the base of a sparse tree. Sunlight filtered between skeletal limbs and threw the burden of heat onto their depleted backs.
—We was tryin toh geh toh de uddah side ah dis cauffee fiel, explains my grandmother. We nevah rheally do it een conditions like dis befoh because it was so dangerous boh sometime we hah to cross one oh two rivah to reach ah nex place whey we goh geh some stock.
Some time later, they stood beside the river where a tree had fallen across as a bridge between two plantations. Neither Rebecca nor Jacinta knew how to swim, and today the river was full. The large tree trunk rose and fell with the current. In November—the rainy season in Trinidad—the river overflowed often. More than a few times, Jacinta had told Rebecca, the river swallowed an overturned tree, making quick passage from one field to another impossible. The trunk could be glimpsed rolling backward and forward in the swirling water. Some men (family men, hard workers) who couldn’t afford to let go of a single day’s work would wade into the muddy water, home to snakes and alligators. Cheered on by others who stood back from the dangerous water, these men felt their way to the base of the fallen tree with their bare feet. When the water reached their ankles, they rolled their pant legs up to the knees. When the water reached their knees, they tightened their belts. When the water reached their waists, they crouched into a fighting stance, their opponent the river whirling all around them.
Jacinta witnessed men fight their way into the water up to forty feet only to stumble right before touching the trunk and be whisked away by the sandy-colored water. Some were able to grip the ridges of the bark, where they held on for dear life, only to be knocked unconscious by a log and stolen by the river’s depths. Others reached the opposite bank, but were bitten by a startled snake before they could wade out of the water and suck the poison out. Families and friends of these men searched the calmer outlets of the river’s path only to find bloated bodies or none at all. Of course there were men who battled the river and triumphed, but Jacinta said they were few. Still, it was because of these few that there were always willing challengers.
—Toh goh in da watah, yuh signin yuh own deat cetificate, my grandmother says.
Today Rebecca was skeptical about crossing. Her mother didn’t ponder or converse with Rebecca about this decision, as she was accustomed to doing. Instead she secured her basket on her shoulder once again, hoisted herself onto the trunk, and lay across it. Rebecca couldn’t bring herself to object. Images of her mother flailing as the river took her while Rebecca stood helpless on the bank flashed through her mind. Convinced there was nothing she could do or say that would dissuade her mother in her grief-stricken state, Rebecca followed. In the same pattern, Rebecca secured her basket and climbed onto the trunk. They knew intimately the deceptive quality of this island’s water, and today the turbulence was harsher than it looked. The bark was slippery with wet moss. Living things teeming in the wetness squished beneath her grasp, but she ignored them.
—Krys dahlin, my grandmother says, we din hah to goh dah way. Dey was ah bridge toh cross ovah boh it was miles ahwey and we know when we reach dey all dem tree done pick. Is ah rheal chance she was takin dey.
Halfway across, her mother stopped. Above the rushing of the river, Rebecca could hear her mother’s heavy breathing. Jacinta tilted a little to the left as the water attacked on their right. Rebecca screamed, MAMA! Jacinta continued across with her arms and legs wrapped around the trunk.
When they reached the other side, Rebecca collapsed. Jacinta wrung water from her dress and emptied her basket. Chile, git up, Jacinta said, we hah wok toh do. But Rebecca didn’t yet trust herself to stand and examined the cuts and scratches on her arms and legs. This was the first time they’d crossed the river while the water flowed around them. In the past, her mother only ever led her over the tree when it was dry.
Secrets We Kept Page 19